Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/247

Rh the box was opened for a look at the new purchase. Hardly had the owner wound it over her hand, when the kincob turban and viper countenance of the rival jeweler was thrust in the open window. There was an "Ah" of such venomous rage that we screamed in alarm. The head vanished, and this sleuth-hound of jewelers, who had shadowed us all day and clung to the back of the carriage, was seen speeding like a deer back to the city.

"Oh, I found Delhi so sad, so depressing. All those scenes of the Mutiny, you know—the Kashmir Gate and the Ridge, don't you know. It was so terrible that I was really glad to get away," said an English visitor. The ruby collar and the detective jeweler had put us beyond any depression incident to the visit to the Ridge, familiar as is its history when one has read Lord Roberts's "Forty-one Years in India" and Mrs. Steele's "On the Face of the Waters." At Delhi, too, one feels that there have been too many sieges and reliefs in these later days for the events of 1857 to be dinned into one quite so endlessly. Newspaper readers are all strategical experts now, and they balance and measure the horrors and heroisms of the siege of Delhi against the modern ones; match the storming of the Kashmir Gate with the glorious storming of the South Gate of Tientsin and of the East Gate of Peking by the Japanese in the China campaign of 1900.

From the Ridge one looks down upon the great plain where the annual camp of exercise, or the great military manœuvers, are held each year. The great durbar or Delhi meeting of 1877 was held on